Wednesday, November 19, 2008

The Virtue of Previous Generations

"We always talk about fiscal policy as being good if it makes future generations better off and bad if it leaves them worse off. . . . [nevertheless] we have very good reason to believe that future generations of Americans (and some others) will enjoy much higher material living standards than we do. Advocating policies that require us to sacrifice today for the benefit of 'our children and grandchildren,' therefore, actually means (on average) advocating a transfer from the relatively poor to the relatively rich."

Assuming this projection of the economic well-being of future generations is correct, how can we explain the strong lingering intuition that we should still try and improve the lot of future generations, even at some expense to us? Here is an initial attempt at a partial explanation.

Buchanan's puzzle is framed in terms of distributive justice (with an egalitarian component), pointing out that adopting a fiscal policy that benefits us at the expense of future generations is just, since even under such circumstances future generations will be much better off than we.

However, distributive justice is not the only framework for explaining moral duties. There are, for example, relationships and roles that generate duties that are supererogatory in terms of distributive justice; duties that do not arise outside such relationships and roles. Such roles and relationships usually involve either a relationship of great dependency or of strong ties. The virtuous mentor, parent, teacher, doctor, superpower, privileged class, employer, grandparent, friend, spouse etc. is the one that at least attempts to benefit those dependent or close to him/her. This often remains the case, even when the beneficiary will most likely do better, down the road, than the benefactor. For example, a teacher who does not help a student to fulfill his or her full potential because that student is destined to surpass the teacher is a less than virtuous teacher. Parents who do not strive to improve the future of their children, because they know that their children are destined to have a better life than they themselves have, are not virtuous parents. Similarly, future generations are often depended on us and may also be "close" to us – for example, the present American generation may have duties towards future generations of Americans; duties that they do not have towards future generations of other nations. Perhaps one partial answer to Buchanan's puzzle is found in this notion of relationship-based virtue.

8 comments:

I think Ori captures a great deal about why we care about near-future generations. A good test of whether he's captured the whole of the matter might be this thought experiment:1) Suppose our welfare is X;2) Suppose that without any special efforts on behalf of the future, our children's generation will have a welfare of 2X, and our grandchildren will enjoy a welfare of 4X, and so on, for 20 generations, when a now-predicted cataclysm will drastically reduce welfare back to 2X. Let's say we can predict that in 20 generations (500 years) a comet will hit the Earth, but that without taking any special measures now, we can expect our distant descendants to develop mechanisms to mitigate the damage and bring welfare back to the state of our children.3) But suppose also that by investing now in space colonization efforts or comet diversion technology, we can ensure that in 20 generations our descendants will be out of the path of the comet. To do so, however, requires us to reduce our own welfare to X-delta. And let's also suppose that delaying getting started on these efforts greatly increases the chances that the technology won't be ready when the comet gets here.4) Would we feel obliged to make the investment to make our descendants 20 generations hence much better off than us, even if doing nothing leaves them at twice our own level of wellbeing?Note that your lineal genetic descendant after 20 generations (assuming descent by only one line) has less than 1 millionth (1/(2^20))of your DNA and as much in common with you culturally as you have with your ancestors living in around the year 1500.